To: combjelly who wrote (732863 ) 8/15/2013 4:28:38 PM From: i-node 3 RecommendationsRecommended By
Read Replies (3) | Respond to >> Smirk was always out of every loop there was.He’s highly analytical and was incredibly quick to be able to discern the core question he needed to answer . It was occasionally a little embarrassing when he would jump ahead of one of his Cabinet secretaries in a policy discussion and the advisor would struggle to catch up. He would sometimes force us to accelerate through policy presentations because he so quickly grasped what we were presenting.We would sometimes have to brief him on an issue that we had last discussed with him weeks or even months before. He would remember small facts and arguments from the prior briefing and get impatient with us when we were rehashing things we had told him long ago. On one particularly thorny policy issue on which his advisors had strong and deep disagreements, over the course of two weeks we (his senior advisors) held a series of three 90-minute meetings with the President. Shortly after the third meeting we asked for his OK to do a fourth. He said, “How about rather than doing another meeting on this, I instead tell you now what each person will say.” He then ran through half a dozen of his advisors by name and precisely detailed each one’s arguments and pointed out their flaws. (Needless to say there was no fourth meeting.) keithhennessey.com By all credible accounts, Bush was not only smart and involved but had first rate analytical skills and the ability sort out the important from the garbage. There is little doubt he is among the most intelligent men to occupy the office in my lifetime.
